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Hi All,
quick one: I've just coded a simple ray tracer that renders spheres, just wondering if anyone can suggest the proper values to give a material to make it a nice very shiny silver ball.
My material can take parameters of diffuse colour (R, G, B each between 0-1), a diffuse coefficient (again 0-1), a specular coefficient (0-1) and a reflectiveness coefficient (0-1).
The phong part of my lighting has hard coded values for the various parameters, if anyone thinks these may need changing fire away with sugestions for these as well.
Cheers!

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80% grey usually works well (RGB 200,200,200). You may need to go a little brighter or dimmer depending on the lighting behavior of your renderer and scene. The effect of shiny silver doesn't come so much from the underlying surface color, but from the way light is reflected off the surface - which of course is primarily controlled by your illumination model and the parameters you provide it. To fully get the effect that you're probably expecting, you'd need something like an environment map to provide high-resolution lighting information for the entire surface of the sphere.

Remember, a nice shiny silver ball in an empty vacuum will look like a dull, flat, grey ball with a little specular highlight on it. What we usually tend of think of as a "metallic" or "shiny" effect is actually reflectance of the surrounding environment.